1 Million Friends

I’m looking in to how RCF is going to grow this year. The #1 thing to do is to change from a company solely owned by me, to becoming a corporation, a non-profit one, where the members own the club. This does a few things:

Members have a larger stake in how things are run at RCF

People can donate and get tax deductions

Schools are more amicable to letting us advertise to their students

Radio and news will give us free publicity when we have events

At some point, I could leave and the club would live on. Not that I plan to leave any time soon, but someday.

Then on top of that I’m looking in to a facility. I want to buy a place, build some equity for the club. There’s a nice space, 15,000 sqft, on 2 acres, it would easily fit 9 strips, all the stuff I want like a pro shop, locker rooms, bag storage, etc.

The price: $1 million… plus now utilities, maintenance staff, taxes, property insurance, etc. would now be on the club.

So the question becomes, do I have 1 million friends willing to donate $1 each? Or make 100,000 friends willing to donate $10 each to see Lafayette have the premier fencing facility in the Midwest? I think in reality, I might know 1,000 people, most of whom I could talk into parting with a buck or two.

So some other ideas I’ve had that might compliment the friend idea well:

We could have RCF things at places like Taco Bell where they ask you “would you like to donate a dollar to the children’s hospital?”

Another thing to do is sell parts of the club. If it were new construction, we could sell bricks in the pavement, or bricks on the side of the building with the names of the person who purchased it. Since this is an existing building we could put plaques at the ends of the strips, “sponsor a strip for $1,000” or something like that, get businesses involved that way.

Of course, if some wealthy individual out there is suddenly feeling passionate about fencing and would like to see a young man realize a dream, then our address is: